Today as NASA engineers fired up the computers on MAVEN, the satellite explorer scheduled to be shot at Mars on Monday, the agency released a video featuring LeVar Burton or Geordi LeForge, chief engineer of the Starship Enterprise, to describe the latest Mars mission.

“The next step in our exploration of the Red Planet is MAVEN and the mystery of the missing atmosphere. And maybe someday, NASA robotic Martian detectives partnered with human scientists will answer the age-old question: Was there ever life on Mars,” the actor intones dramatically in the video.

“We have characterized a very ancient, but strangely new ‘gray Mars’ where conditions once were favorable for life,” said John Grotzinger in March, Mars Science Laboratory project scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif.

In other words — water that could have sustained life.

“Probably, had this water been around and you had been on the planet, you would have been able to drink it,” Grotzinger said in a press conference.

“This is probably definitively the only habitable environment that we have recorded” off Earth, said David Blake, principal investigator for Curiosity’s Chemistry and Mineralogy investigation.

Data from NASA’s Curiosity rover has revealed the Martian environment lacks methane. This is a surprise to researchers because previous data reported by U.S. and international scientists indicated positive detections.

The roving laboratory performed extensive tests to search for traces of Martian methane. Whether the Martian atmosphere contains traces of the gas has been a question of high interest for years because methane could be a potential sign of life, although it also can be produced without biology.

“This important result will help direct our efforts to examine the possibility of life on Mars,” said Michael Meyer, NASA’s lead scientist for Mars exploration. “It reduces the probability of current methane-producing Martian microbes, but this addresses only one type of microbial metabolism. As we know, there are many types of terrestrial microbes that don’t generate methane.”

NASA explains the MAVEN mission:

The spacecraft will arrive at the Red Planet on Sept. 22, 2014, and slip into an elliptical orbit ranging from a low of 93 miles above the surface to a high of 3,728 miles. It also will take five “deep dips” during the course of the mission, flying as low as 77 miles in altitude and providing a cross-section of the top of the atmosphere.

MAVEN is an eight-foot cube weighing about 5,400 pounds at launch — as much as a fully loaded sport utility vehicle. With its twin pairs of gull-wing-shaped solar panels extended, it stretches 37 feet from wingtip to wingtip.

The spacecraft is outfitted with a trio of instrument suites. The Particles and Fields Package, built by the University of California at Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory, contains six individual instruments that characterize the solar wind and ionosphere of the planet. The Remote Sensing Package, built by LASP, will determine global characteristics of the upper atmosphere and ionosphere. The Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer, built by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, will measure the composition and isotopes of neutrals and ions.